There are games I have as Epic freebies, but just thought it was easier to re-buy on Steam for convenience sake on my Steam Deck.

I agree with your comment…except for the part about a small learning curve. The learning curve is steep and difficult. You’ve got to be willing to jump in as an enthusiast and not a casual user. This is not the choice for the vast majority of normies (as you rightly conclude). The saving grace for Linux will be pre-installed systems with extremely polished UI’s (like the Steam Deck).

I’m highly motivated to stay on Linux, but there’s still a list of open issues for me (this is a year and a half after adoption…I’m just living with these limitations now, and there are a couple more I’ve added to my list of unsolvable problems since).

And this is why Linux is still far from mass adoption. Normie’s will not be able to troubleshoot this stuff right out of the box. If there’s going to be widespread adoption then Linux needs to come pre-installed and set up, and preferably unbreakable (like Steam OS).

You’re going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.

Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can’t go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn’t go for it.

Fredora is also top tier and again you can’t go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).

When you’re wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.

I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn’t get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something “beginner friendly” unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.

The stated purpose of the police is not “protect the rich from the poor”.

The stated purpose of war is not “to extract resources from that country and fund the industrial war machine”.

Many things are made for serving a purpose that’s not said out loud.

There’s no point? There is a point: To protect the rich and powerful. The patent system is serving its purpose here as intended by the people who have been making these rules.